Friday, 25 April 2014

'What's this about Finnegans Wake being illustrated?' I hear you ask. 'Isn't it an illustrated book to start with?!'It is indeed. There are three illustrations, which all appear in the Studies chapter, where Shem, Shaun and Issy are having their lessons in the room above the Chapelizod pub.

The Euclid diagram from page 293

The technique here is a reproduction of a schoolboy's (and schoolgirl's)
old classbook complete with marginalia by the twins, who change sides
at half time, footnotes by the girl (who doesn't), a Euclid diagram,
funny drawings etc. It was like that in Ur of the Chaldees too, I
daresay'

Joyce to Frank Budgen, July 1939 (Letters, I,406)

In Greek mythology 'Gaia', the earth, was the great mother, and geometry means 'measuring the earth'. So Joyce's geometry lesson is all about revealing ALP, the great mother in Finnegans Wake. The Euclid diagram represents her pubic triangle, which Shem tricks Shaun into drawing. He says, 'I'll make you to see figuratleavely the whome of your eternal geomater.' 296.36. I'll make you see figuratively (plus fig leaf) the womb/home/who of your eternal mother (Gaia matêr: mother Earth plus geometry). The upper triangle represents ALP's apron, which the twins have lifted ('the maidsapron of our A.L.P.' 297.11). The lower triangle is her exposed 'muddy old triagonal delta' (297.24). Later it's called 'her bosky old delltangle' (465.03).

The two 'funny drawings' appear at the very end of the chapter, drawn by Issy as footnotes to a count of ten above. The ten, in a kind of deformed Irish, represent the chimes of the clock and the 10 Sephiroth of the Kabbala. See fweet to learn more.

Issy's drawn herself thumbing her nose, a gesture of ridicule, her final verdict on the quarrelling twins and the whole lesson. The gesture, with five fingers (including thumb) is inspired by the word 'Cush', standing for the number five in the count above. Elsewhere, Joyce gives us 'reechoable mirthpeals and general thumbtonosery' (253.28). 'The free of my hand to him!' is an offered slap.

I'd always imagined that these were drawn by Joyce. However, it turns out that they are a real girl's drawings, commissioned by James Joyce in Zurich!

The story is told by Fritz Senn:

'I think it was through Carola Giedion-Welcker that I once had a brief conversation with Hans von Curiel. He used to be the director of the Corso Theatre in Zurich, and Joyce may have paid him a tribute, at least Carola Giedion-Welcker told me so, in the Wake, where 'Hans the Curier' may figure as an avatar of Shaun the Post. What he told me, and it is worth passing on, is that Joyce called on him one night and requested a childish drawing to be put at the end of The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies; it is the marginal illustration at the bottom of page 308 in Finnegans Wake. Joyce needed a genuine girl's drawing, and it was done by Hans von Curiel's daughter, significantly named Lucia.'

Joycean Murmoirs (2007). p48.

'Hans the Curier' can be found at 125.14

(The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies is actually the chapter before the one with the drawings).

These drawings first appeared in the 1937 Corvinus Press booklet, Storiella as She is Syung, which also included an initial letter (left) by Lucia Joyce. This was the finaledition of an extract from Work in Progress published before the book itself came out. Only 175 copies were printed, and they go for vast sums today.

Why did Joyce need a genuine girl's drawing? For the same reason that he largely assembled Finnegans Wake out of phrases taken from other writings, and also accepted coincidence as a collaborator. Joyce's bookwas a collective undertaking, in which he saw himself as a channel rather than the author.

'Every dimmed letter in it is a copy and not a few of the silbils and wholly words....The last word in stolentelling!'Finnegans Wake, 424.32

'Really it is not I who am writing this crazy book,' Joyce told a party of friends. 'It is you, and you,
and you, and that man over there, and that girl at the next table.'
Eugene Jolas, 'My Friend James Joyce'in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism (ed Givens), 1948'The book was indeed his life and he believed that he was entrapping some part of the essence
of life within its pages....Joyce was not in his own opinion simply
writing a book, he was also performing a work of magic.'

Thursday, 24 April 2014

The postman recently brought me an object of great beauty - a review copy of the new Folio Society edition of Finnegans Wake, illustrated by John Vernon Lord. I was delighted to get hold of this, not least because it costs £99!The book weighs 5lbs and stands a foot tall in its black slipcase. It's black because Finnegans Wake is a night book. There's a bolt of lightning shooting down from the top left corner, standing for the 100 letter thunderclaps that blast their way through the book. In his introduction, Lord says that he was also thinking of Anna Livia Plurabelle, the personification of the river Liffey:

'As 'lightning' the image appears to go diagonally downwards towards the earth, representing the Fall. Alternatively, seen as a river, the tributaries go upwards and join together as a kind of resurrection.'That quotation shows just what a lot of thought that Lord has put into his illustrations, and what a great interpreter of the Wake he is too. He's thinking like Joyce here!

Sliding the book out of its case reveals a night scene, with a full moon and cloudsabove an endless ocean - where the Liffey pours its water at the end of Finnegans Wake. Hovering above are Joyce's sigla - the symbols he used to indicate the characters. On the back there is also the constellation of the Great Bear, whose pattern is echoed in the arrangement of the sigla. In his introduction, Lord talks about the many uses of the stars and clouds in the book:

'We have 'Nuctumbulumbumus', which suggests cumulonimbus thunderclouds and, at the same time (through the Latin ambulabamus), the notion of us ambling in the night.'

Here's the very first illustration - a general treatment of the nature of writing and Finnegans Wake as a 'nightmaze' and a 'jungle of woods.' Humpty Dumpty appears here and in several other illustrations.

The narrow strip at the bottom is a 'predella', something you find at the bottom of medieval altarpieces, like this one by Carlo Crivelli. Lord uses these predellas as a link between the illustrations.

Lord has picked eleven pivotal moments in the book to illustrate. The first one is the great Fall from the book's opening page. It's the fall of the hod carrier, Tim Finnegan, from his ladder in the comic ballad.

'One morning Tim was rather full.
His head felt heavy, which made him shake.
He fell from a ladder and he broke his skull
And they carried him home, his corpse to wake'

It's also the fall of the giant Finn MacCool, Adam, Humpty Dumpty, Parnell, Lucifer and all other falls through history, including Wall Street crashes. In the background, towers are being erected - the New York Woolworth building, the Tower of Babel and the Eiffel Tower.

'Oftwhile balbulous, mithre ahead, with goodly trowel in
grasp and ivoroiled overalls which he habitacularly fondseed, like
Haroun Childeric Eggeberth he would caligulate by multiplicab-les the
alltitude and malltitude until he seesaw by neatlight of the
liquor wheretwin twas born, his roundhead staple of other days
to rise in undress maisonry upstanded (joygrantit!),a waalworth
of a skyerscape of most eyeful hoyth entowerly, erigenating from
next to nothing and celescalating the himals and all,
hierarchitectitiptitoploftical, with a burning bush abob off its
baubletop and
with larrons o'toolers clittering up and tombles a'buckets clottering
down.' 4.34-5.05

The giant Finn falls, forming the city of Dublin, with his 'humptyhillhead' at Howth and his feet in the Phoenix Park. That's Howth Castle in the predella at the bottom.

I particularly love this second illustration, which shows HCE's encounter with a cad in the Phoenix Park - an event which leads to his own fall and disgrace. On the left, the cad is greeting HCE in Gaelic.

Here's Lord's description of the illustration.

'It is alleged in this
‘chapter’ that HCE behaved improperly in Phoenix Park, indecently
exposing himself (behaving ‘with an ongentilmensky immodus’) in front of
‘a pair of dainty maidservants in the swoolth of the rushy hollow’. The
cad tells his wife about HCE’s alleged lewd behaviour and his wife
tells a priest over a cup of tea, who in turn tells a professor at the
races, who lets everybody know about it. The all-seeing eyes among the
trees, the pointing fingers and the four sets of mouths all represent
this cycle of snooping, accusation, rumour and gossip about HCE. The
‘thunderword’ appearing diagonally across the illustration makes the
sound of glass breaking, perhaps representing the collapse of
Earwicker’s world.'

The predella at the bottom shows Oliver Cromwell, and Humpty Dumpty falling from the Magazine Wall in the Park - illustrations of the ballad mocking HCE on page 44.

The next illustration is of the hen, another version of ALP, scratching a teastained letter out of a midden, as described in Book One, Chapter Five.

Lord writes, 'It seems as if the whole of the world’s existence is
being brought out of the earth, foraging for a record of the past:
‘where in the waste is the wisdom?’'

Here's J.S.Atherton's description of the Hen chapter:This
midden is a symbol, elaborated later, for the inhabited world in which
men have left so many traces. The letter stands as a symbol for all
attempts at written communication including all other letters, all the
world's literature, the Book of Kells, all manuscripts, all the sacred books of the world, and also Finnegans Wake itself. One reason why The Book of Kells
is included here is that it was once 'stolen by night...and found after
a lapse of some months, concealed under sods' (Sullivan) The Books at the Wake p62-3

That's the Tunc page of the Book of Kells at the bottom.

Here's Lord's illustration of Joyce's fable of the Mookse and the Gripes, a retelling of Aesop's fable of the Fox and the Grapes. The Mookse and the Gripes are the rival twins, Shaun and Shem, and Space and Time. It's also a fable about Pope Adrian IV, the English pope who granted Ireland to King Henry II of England.

The challenge here is to depict the 'gripes' - Shem in the form of a bunch of grapes. Lord gives us straightforward grapes, but have a look at Ralph Ziegerman's solution here. Lord's description:

'The Mookse is represented
by Pope Adrian IV (Nicholas Brakespear, or ‘Bragspear’), the only
English Pope. He is sitting on a stone, ‘pompifically’. He finds the
overripe gripes (grapes) wrapped around a tree by the edge of a
‘boggylooking stream’. Above them is Nuvoletta, as a cloud on a balcony,
spraying mist: ‘Nuvoletta in her lightdress, spunn of sisteen shimmers,
was looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars and listening all
she childishly could....The Gripes is also a representation of Shem, with Shaun as the
Mookse. Their arguments descend into insults, and the two arguers
eventually metamorphose into an apron and a handkerchief on the bank of
the river Liffey.’.

Nuvoletta is Issy, the daughter in Finnegans Wake.For the next few I'll quote Lord's descriptions of them.

'This illustration is mostly based on the Latin episode when Shem mixes
‘ink’ from his own excrement and urine and ‘through the bowels of his
misery’ he writes ‘over every square inch of the only foolscap
available, his own body’. It appears that whilst Shem prepared the ‘ink’
he chanted ‘fermented words’, possibly 'Lingua mea calamus scribae
velociter scribentis', which is from Psalm 45:1, ‘My tongue is the pen
of a ready writer.’ This is represented in my version of a
twelfth-century psalter illumination from St Albans. The expression
‘fermented words’ could of course be alluding to the text of Finnegans
Wake itself, having the same initials as well as being something of a
description of its text.'

'Here we can see the two
washerwomen gossiping about Earwicker and Anna Livia Plurabelle by the
banks of the Liffey. The river expands into a map of Dublin Bay, thus
illustrating how the women become further apart from each other during
the course of their gossiping. Bats fly above them (‘The chittering
waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk’), and salmon are
swimming in the river, a recurring theme throughout the book: ‘like any
gay lord salomon, her bulls they were ruhring, surfed with spree’. Below
the moon, a few stones can be seen on the sheet below the large rock,
representative of the transformation of one of the washerwomen and
symbolising the static state of permanence. ‘I feel as heavy as yonder
stone,’ she says. A butcher’s apron hangs from the smaller tree; a tree
that represents the transformation of the other washerwoman, symbolising
growth, movement and eventual death. ‘I feel as old as yonder elm,’ she
says.'

'This is closing time in the
tavern: the landlord, Earwicker, has drunk his customers’ leftovers,
sucking up ‘whatever surplus rotgut . . . was left by the lazy lousers
in the different bottoms of the various different replenquished drinking
utensils’. Earwicker’s manservant, Sackerson, holds the key to the
tavern door: 'Ere the sockson locked at the dure. Which he would,
shuttinshore. And lave them to sture.' Finally he calls out, "Tide,
genmen, plays'. The group of customers ‘all pour forth’ from the tavern.
Each of the four singing old men (‘the fore olders’) are walking out of
the frame in different directions: ‘North’, ‘Soother’, ‘Eats’ and
‘Washte’. There is a strip of sixteen composers’ portraits across the
top of the illustration, brought into the text in the form of wordplay.
The first three, from the left, are Rossini (‘rosescenery’), Haydn
(‘haydyng’) and Meyerbeer (‘mere bare’).'

This is a wonderful illustration ofmy favourite chapter, Mamalujo, in which the ship-board lovemaking of Tristan and Isolde is witnessed by the four senile old men.

I laughed aloud when I spotted the four old men at the bottom.

'Tristan and Isolde are
‘kiddling and cuddling’ as they sail away from the aged King Mark of
Cornwall (‘Kram of Llawnroc’). Above them, mocking seagulls are crying
out: ‘The winging ones, overhoved, shrillgleescreaming. Seahawk,
seagull, curlew and plover, kestrel and capercailzie.’ The four old men,
among the waves with their donkey, are known as Mamalujo: in this
chapter Matt Gregory, Marcus Lyons, Luke Tarpey, and Johnny MacDougall.
In another guise they hover at the top of the picture as the four
gospels (‘gastspiels’), represented here in a similar way to their
appearance in the Book of Kells. They spy on the lovers, having much to
say but only little of value, ‘all their mouths making water’.'

Here's another of Joyce's fables, the Ondt and the Gracehoper, which is about Time and Space. The feckless grasshopper is Shem, Joyce and Time. The respectable ant is Shaun, Wyndham Lewis and Space. Time gets the last word:

Here's Lord again:'The Ondt and the Gracehoper is based on the well-known fable, The Ant
and the Grasshopper. Shem is the Gracehoper (represented as an artist,
author, painter and musician – wasting his time), and his brother Shaun
is the Ondt, the practical businessman for whom money matters most.
Attributes of the artist (easel, guitar and pen) surround the
Gracehoper, whilst the Ondt is coughing and asking questions, with his
hoard of cash situated behind him. In the end Shaun falls into a barrel,
which rolls backwards into the river Liffey. Some of the philosophers
mentioned in the text have also been incorporated into the illustration:
Confucius, Melanchthon, Aristotle, Schelling, Plato, Schopenhauer,
Vico, Kant, Maeterlinck and Leibniz. Wyndham Lewis, who is also
mentioned, is between Kant and Maeterlinck.'

'Shaun has now been
‘metandmorefussed’ into Yawn: ‘Pure Yawn lay low. On the mead of the
hillock he lay, heartsoul dormant mid shadowed landshape…’ He is put
through an inquisition by the four old men, accompanied by their donkey,
who hold a ‘starchamber quiry’ over his character. The ‘Mamalujo’ are
represented on the four sides of the illustration, as the four symbols
of the Evangelists (based on how they appear in the Book of Armagh). The
four ‘apostles’ are also ‘quartermasters’, standing for the four
provinces of Ireland (here depicted by their flags). They cross-examine
Yawn about the fall of his father, Earwicker. Later Yawn seems to become
HCE, boasting about his feats, as well as his accomplishments as a
builder. The interlacement design is based on one by Leonardo da Vinci,
and represents the ‘spreading abroad’ of the ‘drifter nets, the
chronies, gleamy seiners’ nets’ by the four inquisitors.'

Lord has a very controlled and orderly style - he's described his influences as Paul Klee and Victorian steel engravings. It's interesting to compare his approach with Clinton Cahill's looser Wake illustrations, for the James Joyce Centre, Dublin. Cahill has also given us the scene with Yawn and the Four Old Men (right).These are two very different ways of representing the dream state. Lord's method reminds me of Hitchcock who, talking of the dream sequence in Spellbound, said he wanted to represent dreams not with the misty style usually favoured by Hollywood, but with hard edges and sharpness of daylight.

Here's John Vernon Lord's final illustration, using superimposition to show a woman who is also a river. Lord writes:

'Anna Livia Plurabelle’s
face merges with the sea as she delivers her monologue at the end of the
book. She is a personification of the river Liffey, which flows, as a
dissolving dream, into the vast ocean at the dawn of a new day. ‘This
baylight’s growing,’ she says, hence the strip of light across her
forehead. After a sequence of drawn illustrations we now have an image
based on a photograph in order to indicate wakefulness and reality after
the dream. The photograph is of Nora, Joyce’s wife, an inspiration for
Anna Livia Plurabelle. Anna’s last line of the book is ‘A way a lone a
lost a last a loved a long the’. This, an incomplete sentence, completes
itself at the very start of the book as ‘riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s,
from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of
recirculation back to Howth Castle & Environs’. The book finishes
where it began; the endless cycle of time goes on.'

THE CORRECTED TEXT

The book uses Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon's 'Corrected Text', which has around 9,000 changes to the 1939 published version. Unlike all other editions of the Wake, it has different pagination, so it can't be used alongside critical resources, such as McHugh's Annotations or Fweet. But Rose and O'Hanlon write in the preface, 'It is not a replacement for the 1939 edition...but an alternative to it.'

My main objection to this version is that they've broken up the final chapter into four separate sections. If Joyce had wanted it to be in four sections, he would have had it laid out like that. This reminds me of Rose's controversial 'Readers Edition' of Ulysses, where he broke up Joyce's beautiful poetic compound words ('snotgreen scrotumtightening sea' becoming 'snot-green scrotum-tightening sea') - supposedly to make it easier to read! You can read John Kidd's review of that here. That review led to a great spat in the pages of the New York Review of Books.Despite this, all Joyceans should get a copy of the Corrected Text. I can't think of any better way of buying it than with John Vernon Lord's wonderful illustrations.